Who Made My Puzzle?

Peter Gordon is a well known constructor, but when he’s not making puzzles, he is the editorial director at Puzzlewright Press (a Sterling Publishing imprint), where he oversees all of the puzzle books.

Let’s meet him.

Where do you currently reside?

Great Neck, N.Y.

Where and when was your first puzzle published?

First crossword was in the January 1989 issue of Games.

When was your first New York Times crossword published?

Sept. 5, 1989. [Thanks to David Steinberg and the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project for the digitized version of the puzzle.]

How did you get into puzzling? What is your first memory of solving?

I’ve been into puzzles as far back as I can remember. I have a distinct memory from when I was 5 or 6. I got a book called “Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers” by Martin Gardner.

One question read: “A harmonica cost a dollar more than a pencil. Together they cost $1.10. How much did each cost?” I worked and worked on it, but couldn’t figure it out, so I asked one of my older brothers for help. He was learning algebra at the time, so he taught me algebra, and he showed me how to set up the equation [X + (1 + X) = 1.1] and then how to solve it, and I was hooked on math. I remained hooked on math, majoring in it at M.I.T.

By the way, I still have the book from 1971. I sent it to Martin Gardner and he autographed it for me. (If you aren’t into math, the answer to the puzzle, as it appears in the book, is below.) I was much more into math and logic puzzles than word puzzles, except I did like cryptograms. My interest in crossword puzzles came much later.

(Answer: “The harmonica cost $1.05, the pencil cost 5¢. Perhaps you thought the harmonica cost $1 and the pencil cost 10¢, but then the harmonica would cost 90¢ more than the pencil. To cost a dollar more, the harmonica must cost $1.05 and the pencil 5¢, because $1.05 minus 5¢ is $1.”)

What made you decide to try your hand at making a crossword puzzle?

I got a job at Games in 1988, where crosswords ruled. The constructor Mike Shenk taught me how to make them.

Why do you do this to yourself?

What else do you do with a degree in math?

Do you use a computer software constructing program and, if so, which one? What do you like about it?

Yes. Crossword Compiler. The key component of the program is the ability to score your word list and fill the puzzle with words only above a certain score. I can try many possibilities over and over until I find something that uses very few suboptimal words (or none at all, if I’m lucky).

When I started making crosswords, it was all done by hand, and not only was it incredibly slow, the results weren’t so good. There’s a reason old puzzles have a lot of obscure words. When it takes as long as it took before computers, once you got anything that worked, you moved on, even if there was a bad answer in there.

How many hours a week, on average, do you spend on refining your tools, like your word list?

If I added it all up over the years, it would be such a large number that I would be too embarrassed to say. Pretty much every day I add to my list and tweak the scores of words already on my list. It will never end, but the fill the computer ends up using reflects my word rankings, so it’s worth the effort.